The present invention relates to a phantom kidney stone system for use with a commercial lithotripsy system.
Currently there is no uniformly repeatable test procedure which can be used by manufacturers and/or users of commercial lithotripsy systems for quality control purposes in order to ascertain that the lithotripsy system is functioning properly.
Also, there is no uniformly repeatable test procedure which can be used to train operators of commercial lithotripsy systems to improve the accuracy with which the operators perform an actual lithotripsy operation. There is a need for the operators to be trained properly so that when an actual lithotripsy operation is performed, the lowest possible number of shock waves are used to break up the kidney stone. It is necessary to keep the number of shock waves which are input into human tissue as low as possible. Therefore, operators should be trained prior to performing an actual lithotripsy operation on a human patient. At the present time, the operators do not have an opportunity to work with the lithotripsy system until they actually use the equipment on a human patient.
There is a further need to be able to accurately record the number of shock waves output by a lithotripsy system that are needed to break up a kidney stone into fragments of a size small enough to be excreted through the human urinary tract.